Re-Enacting the Futural Past Through Documentary Film Mortimer, R
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WestminsterResearch http://www.westminster.ac.uk/westminsterresearch Ghosts, Imagination and Theatre: re-enacting the futural past through documentary film Mortimer, R. This is an electronic version of a PhD thesis awarded by the University of Westminster. © Ms Roz Mortimer, 2020. The WestminsterResearch online digital archive at the University of Westminster aims to make the research output of the University available to a wider audience. Copyright and Moral Rights remain with the authors and/or copyright owners. Ghosts, Imagination and Theatre: re-enacting the futural past through documentary film Roz Mortimer A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Westminster for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy July 2020 Abstract This practice-led research looks at creative strategies to address the under-represented and marginalised history of Roma persecution in WWII. The research has resulted in a film, The Deathless Woman (89’ 2019), a hybrid documentary film that has been created in response to European sites of atrocity against the Roma. This practice employs a number of experimental strategies that seek to supplement the limited historiography of the genocide of the Roma during WWII and formulate an innovative approach to documentary production that questions notions of authenticity and indexicality in Western knowledge formation. Starting in 1942 with the murder of a Roma family in a small village in Poland, the film aims to bring these events into the present by employing strategies such as the use of ghosts, fantasy and theatre within a documentary framework. Through this, the film aims to visualise and connect the traumatic past of the Roma to other traumatic pasts and to the traumatic present. This research project interrogates two central research questions. Firstly, how might a phenomenological approach to the invisible be employed in knowledge production to reframe our relationship to traumatic or marginalised histories and make their legacy relevant? Within this, I employ an experimental approach to empiricism that foregrounds the sensory as a device to investigate sites of atrocity. That these events were traumatic and centred on specific geographic sites is critical in my choice of sensory methods. I have paid particular attention to atmospheres, ghosts and affects in constructing both a film and an academic argument that foregrounds sensory experience as a method for knowledge production. Critical to my methodology is my decision not to make binary distinctions between imagination and reality (or truth and fiction), but rather to see the two as interrelated and intertwined. More specifically, this extends to declining to rationalise such things as ghosts, but rather to treat the ghost as an object of experience and this has led to the employment of a ghost as a legitimatised narrator within a documentary film. This fantastic notion has been extended into the film’s production through the application of theatrical methods as strategies to further critically challenge and redress the failures of both the archive and of history and has led to my second research question – how might creative strategies in hybrid documentary film practice be effective in reframing marginalised histories in 1 an affectively-impactful way? I demonstrate the potential for non-realist modes such as the literary fantastic, the methods of documentary theatre and the tableau vivant to offer audiences a route to thinking about complicated and traumatic subject matter while simultaneously revealing the virtues and flaws of its sources. The seemingly paradoxical nature of combining documentary and the fantastic comes out of a consideration of what role ghosts might have in the way traumatic histories are communicated and represented, and most importantly, how the ghost has the capacity to bring the past forwards to us in the present. This inter-relationship between imagination or artifice and moral or political thought is at the heart of my work. 2 Contents Abstract 1 List of Figures 5 Acknowledgements and Declaration 6 Part One: Practice 7 The film 7 The beginning 12 Part Two: Written Thesis 15 Introduction 15 Research background and motivation 15 Marginalised and under-historicised histories 19 Socially engaged filmmaking 22 Moving beyond the empirical 27 Research structure 29 Chapter 1: Experience, Affect, Witnessing 33 1.1 Introduction 33 1.2 The invisible index: traces of trauma 39 1.3 Affects with intentions 42 1.4 Breaking the frame of Holocaust testimony 45 1.5 The rupture between two worlds 50 1.6 When she addresses us in her voice she ceases to be forgotten 52 1.7 Conclusion 56 Chapter 2: Trauma, Ghosts, the Uncanny 59 2.1 Introduction 59 2.2 The uncanny: hiding in plain sight 64 2.3 Absence, gaps, secrecy and silence: bringing the blind spot into view 68 2.4 Memory activism: writing the political ghost 71 2.5 Spectral cinema: invisible things are not necessarily not there 75 2.6 Conclusion 78 3 Chapter 3: History, Imagination and the Fantastic 81 3.1 Introduction 81 3.2 Trauma cinema: challenging the truth-claim of history 89 3.3 The realm of the fantastic: extending the unthinkable 94 3.4 The absence of the real: disrupting the index 98 3.5 Conclusion 105 Chapter 4: Theatre, the Tableau Vivant and Entering the Spectacle 108 4.1 Introduction 108 4.2 Re-positioning the past: trauma and the ethics of re-enactment 114 4.3 Re-experiencing the real: the mirage of theatre 119 4.4 They don’t move, they are already dead: the tableau-isation of gesture 125 4.5 Pools of affect: super-charging affect in the tableau vivant 131 4.6 Conclusion 135 Conclusions 137 References 141 Bibliography 141 Filmography 151 Performances and Artworks 152 4 List of Figures Fig. 1 Zofia’s post-it-note 12 Fig. 2 Lake Grábler near Várpalota (Bársony and Daróczi, 2004) 16 Fig. 3 Film stills: Communion (Siopis, 2011) 54 Fig. 4 Film still: John Burgan’s self-portrait, Memory of Berlin (1998) 67 Fig. 5 Film still: History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige (Tajiri, 1991) 91 Fig. 6 Film still: The Missing Picture (Panh, 2013) 95 Fig. 7 Film stills: the Seeker’s objects, The Deathless Woman (2019) 100 Fig. 8 Making the figurines for The Missing Picture (Panh, 2015) 101 Fig. 9 Making the headless bodies for The Deathless Woman (Mortimer, 2019) 103 Fig. 10 Untitled collage from found images (Mortimer 2012) 117 Fig. 11 Setting up the Seeker’s testimony scene in The Deathless Woman (Mortimer, 2019) 120 Fig. 12 Kamp (Hotel Modern, 2005) 121 Fig. 13 Film still: The History of the World: Part 11 (Helle, 2004) 122 Fig. 14 The Gypsy-Family Camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau. (SS Central Construction Management, 1943) 123 Fig. 15 Film still: The Deathless Woman (Mortimer, 2019) 123 Fig. 16 Film still: The Act of Killing (Oppenheimer et al., 2012) 126 Fig. 17 Film still: The Deathless Woman (Mortimer, 2019) 127 Fig. 18 Film Still: In the Crosswind (Helde, 2014) 129 Fig. 19 Film Still: The Deathless Woman (Mortimer, 2019) 133 5 Accompanying material The Deathless Woman film. 89 minutes. 2019 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisors Dr Uriel Orlow and Professor May Adadol Ingawanij for their guidance during the writing of this thesis, and the support staff at University of Westminster for supporting my practice. Thanks also to the Visual Sociology team at Goldsmiths, University of London for introducing me to the notion of the ghost having political agency and where this research began to take shape. Thanks also to the friends and colleagues at conferences and symposia who gave me valuable feedback as this research developed: Visible Evidence XXIII, The Poetics and Politics of Documentary (University of Sussex), Ecstatic Truth: Defining the Essence of Animated Documentary (Royal College of Art), The Forensic Imagination (The American Comparative Literature Association), The Tableau Vivant: Across Media, History, and Culture (Columbia University, NY.). The Polish, Hungarian and Roma people who willingly offered their testimony on camera, even though at times this was a difficult undertaking for them. The many other Roma and Travellers in the UK, Hungary, Poland and Czech Republic who welcomed me into their homes and communities and helped facilitate this research. My partner Jeremy Williams who amazingly gave up holidays to accompany me on field trips to visit death camps, locate mass graves, and record witness testimony in Poland and Hungary – it was through conversations with him about landscape, history and atrocity that this project began. And most importantly, my father Alfred Mortimer who always championed my work and offered unconditional support, but to my great sadness, did not live to see me complete this project. In gratitude, all. Declaration I declare that all the material contained in this thesis is my own work. 6 Part One: Practice The film The Deathless Woman. HD video, 89 minutes, 2019 Written, Produced, Directed and Designed by Roz Mortimer The Deathless Woman was made with the support of a considerable number of filmmaking professionals. Key Credits Cinematography (re-enactments): Peter Emery Cinematography (testimony, landscapes and actuality in Hungary and Poland): Roz Mortimer Aerial Cinematography: Louis Carraz, Tony Baur, Josh Cate, R.J. Sindelar, Ian Titchener Additional Cinematography: Fred Fabre, Tomas Frigstad, Jessica Mitchell, Gaby Norland Visual Effects: Joe Pavlo Sound Designers: Chu-Li Shewring, Stefan Smith Production Design, Model and Set Construction: Roz Mortimer Set Dresser: Mark Hill Editor: Daniel Goddard Script Editor: Margaret Glover Interpreter, Hungary: Clara Farkas Interpreter, Poland: Magda Bartosz Interpreter, Czech Republic: Martin Gálas Translators: Gyula Vamosi, Clara Farkas, Dorota Miklasinska Romani Language Consultant: Gyula Vamosi Cast The Deathless Woman: Iveta Kokyová The Seeker: Loren O’Dair The Boy: Oliver Malik 7 On practice, process and creative collaboration The production of The Deathless Woman stretched from summer 2011 to autumn 2019.